Wi-Fi trumps muffin mess at science fair

Doug Pugh

Sunday

Jan 26, 2014 at 12:01 AMJan 26, 2014 at 1:00 AM

I had to stop helping my daughter with her homework about a year ago when I realized I was putting way too much pressure on Sadie. After all, she was only in the fifth grade and simply wasn't yet equipped for my advanced style of tutoring. Whenever we would start working on her pre-algebra assignments, it would inevitably devolve into long bouts of unacceptable juvenile misbehavior: crying, screaming, fist-banging and notebook-throwing. Then I would get up off the floor, wipe my eyes and head to the bedroom while she sat there quietly and finished the homework on her own.

So I was surprised last week when Sadie came to me for help on her science fair project. "Dad, I know that you basically suck at science," she said, "but almost all of the other kids in my class are having their fathers help them with their projects. As long as you don't kick another hole in the kitchen wall like you did when we were working on my art project last year, I'm willing to give it another shot." I hesitated at first to get involved but started to come around when I read through the entire project assignment, which provided examples of acceptable experiments. There was a bunch of mumbo jumbo about empirical methodology, independent variables and other total nonsense, but then I ran across something that sounded like it might be right up our alley: "You might discover interesting results by performing a controlled experiment incorrectly — that is, by introducing improper variables which would contaminate otherwise correct results."

The most contaminated experimental results I could think of involved my mother cooking dinner when I was a kid. Because she made it to the grocery store only about five times per decade, there was never even a remote possibility that she was going to have all of the proper ingredients for any particular dish and would therefore have to resort to amazing creativity. For instance, did you know that you can substitute partially melted Crisco for milk, or stale bread crumbs for baking flour, when you are preparing a meal for your family? Well, as it turns out, you can't. I can remember one Thanksgiving when my dad took a baking sheet of my mom's dinner rolls out into the driveway and ran over them with his SUV. The aluminum tray was crushed and gnarled beyond recognition, but the rolls remained perfectly viable, assuming you were in the market for marble steppingstones to place in your garden.

With this in mind, Sadie and I decided that our project would be to bake two batches of blueberry muffins, one using baking soda and the other using baking powder. Before starting our experiment, the assignment suggested that we formulate a hypothesis guessing what the results of our project might be. I harkened back to some things I'd heard my mother suggest in the kitchen when I was growing up, and we theorized that baking soda and baking powder are basically one and the same and are only called something different as a result of a marketing ploy launched by the National Association of Baking Supply Purveyors so that you will always have to spend double the money buying both of them for your pantry. As it turned out, this hypothesis ended up being maybe sort of correct in that both batches of blueberry muffins came out about the same, except that one batch looked somewhat like blueberry muffins and the other batch looked somewhat like petrified kangaroo dung.

The next afternoon, we carried our muffins into the school cafeteria so we could set up Sadie's science fair booth. I looked over at the booth next to ours and noticed a boy and his father fidgeting with a crumpled cardboard box with a bunch of pipe cleaners and paper clips sticking out of it.

"Poor kid," I muttered to myself. "He tried to make some sort of little model UFO. Looks like crap. Not everyone's cut out for this science fair stuff."

A few minutes later, I stood there beaming as my daughter launched into her presentation. Her classmates and their parents stood there reluctantly fingering our muffins as Sadie eloquently explained to them that we ended up forgetting which batch contained baking soda and which batch contained baking powder but that it didn't even matter because nobody would ever dare eat any of these muffins to begin with. I started to think to myself that we might actually dominate this thing and take home the blue ribbon, when Sadie's speech was abruptly interrupted by loud music roaring from the UFO kid's booth next to us.

"How rude! What's that noise?" I shouted, glaring over at the kid and his joke of a project.

"Oh, that's Zach," Sadie said. "He and his dad are super-smart. They built a fully functional Wi-Fi radio using only stuff they found in a Dumpster."

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